AMAD
"Archivum Medii Aevi Digitale - Specialized open access repository for research in the middle ages"To submission
| Title: | Nikolova-Houston, Increasing the Visibility of Slavic Medieval manuscripts, p. 1 INCREASING THE VISIBILITY OF SLAVIC MEDIEVAL MANUSCRIPTS |
| Contributor: | The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives |
| Description: | Discovery. It means different things to different people. It rarely happens quickly. More often, it involves peeling away layers of meaning to discover a hidden essence. Even with a revelation, discovery resembles sculpting; refining the revelation to reveal its essence. Slavic medieval manuscripts, appearing at first glance to be poor orphans, have revealed themselves to be giants of human dignity. They represent the survival through unimaginable sufferings of marginalized people during truly evil times. Access to these Slavic manuscripts, however, presents unique problems to the scholar. Western institutions tend to marginalize Slavic manuscripts. I believe this marginalization comes from the poor condition of many manuscripts and because of misconceptions about their intellectual value. Only recently has inter-disciplinary interest expanded manuscript research beyond previous boundaries through the technologies of information science and the viewpoints of literary criticism, historiography, and hypertext theory. I describe here my discovery of the cultural heritage of Slavic manuscripts and my application of interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks to them. I also describe efforts to preserve and provide access to these artifacts through conventional conservation techniques and through electronic publishing. DISCOVERY OF THE HIDDEN TREASURES My quest started innocently enough as a class assignment; yet that assignment transformed my life into a treasure hunt. Christopher de Hamel's A History of Medieval Manuscripts (2001) provided the treasure map. The interplay of color and gold on the images illuminated my soul. Seeking further, I searched the Internet. First, the Internet led to Hilandar Research Center, the heart of Slavic manuscript studies in the Americas and the largest microfilm collection of Slavic manuscripts in the world. Hilandar revolutionized Slavic studies through universal access to treasures formerly remote and forbidden to women. |
| URI: | https://www.amad.org/jspui/handle/123456789/73121 |
| Other Identifier: | http://digitalcommons.kent.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article%3D1018%26context%3Dacir http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.680.1875 |
| AMAD ID: | 568420 |
| Appears in Collections: | BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) General history of Europe |
